Music+Game Crits/Essays by Sean Han Tani

“Weird”

What’s a ‘weird’ game?

Well, here’s an idea. If I stopped a person on the street, and they played games, if I asked which was weirder, Fortnite, or a game off of the (lovingly named and wonderful) Weird Fucking Games Twitter, which would they choose?

In popular culture, the ‘weird game’ is the polar opposite of the ‘pop game’. A pop game is a game that a random gamer would be likely to not deem ‘weird’. A pop game often has the marketing budget to drown out an entire game culture’s news cycle for a week or two, only to disappear weeks after as if it never existed. A pop game can suck up 40 hours of my time and not change me in the slightest. A pop game is often a corpgame (corporation created game). A pop game is probably not a static game.

Negate the premise of Fortnite, negate the breadth of Red Dead Redemption 2. That’s what a ‘weird game’ usually is.

I am disturbed by this definition of ‘weird’. You know what is weirder to me?

These kinds of things are called ‘violent’ or ‘wrong’, but we never categorize them as ‘weird’, they’re always considered ‘normal’.

Instead, most gamers think something is weird because a single line of dialogue was just a widdle bit too confewsing (っ◞‸◟c) or the art was too weird because a tree didn’t look like the ones in real life (｡•́︿•̀｡), or, or, a line of dialogue made them feel bad inside because it challenged their beliefs 😦 … waa waa…